Collection of the best infographics & data visualization on the Web!

A War of the Worlds is Upon Us! Digg vs. Reddit! In a steal cage! Michael Buffer is perched on top of a monster truck with a megaphone ready to announce tonight’s contenders. So, without, further ado..”Let’s get ready to Stummmble!” Stumbleupon? What are you doing here?! You showing up is like bringing a bat to a gun fight! Not to mention that you’re basically a neutral party in this scuffle. So, go on, get!

The above infographic tackles the issue of digg vs. reddit from several angles. In order to create this graphic, the company behind it, Rate Rush, had to spend two weeks collating information. They looked at every story to hit the digg homepage and every link to receive 100 points on reddit. They also noted precisely when the link became popular, as well as the user who submitted the link and the destination domain.

It’s interesting to note that there is large crossover in terms of which sites are popular on digg and which sites are popular on reddit. Imgur.com, the image hosting website, is very popular on both sites. Apparently, this site is the image hosting website of choice in this demographic. I would, in time, like to research why that is the case. What does it offer over say Tinypic.com or Photobucket? There must be something about this photo sharing site that has caused it to be popular among the geek demographic.

The graphic then goes on to show the most common words appearing in titles on the sites. There is large crossover here as well, namely with the words “BP” (this study was done during the height of news reports about the oil spill) and “Google.” Now, here’s a stat sure to ruffle some feathers and cause some fists to shake. Digg has long been thought of as a site that recycles content from reddit to form its frontpage. If you bought into this idea, this graphic won’t cause you to flip your opinion. All it will do is reaffirm your premise. The graphic presents empirical evidence that the reddit community does in fact find and post links to reddit before the digg community posts links to digg. Early alien gets the worm, ay.

Let’s move on now to the grading bit.

Infographics Scorecard

Design: A

The design of this graphic is top of the line. The images capture your attention and the graphs are unique and fascinating. When you create charts, it’s important that they don’t bog down. The makers of this infographic have a clear understanding of how to make compelling pie charts and tables.

Content: A

This graphic’s creators get an A for effort, that’s for sure. They had to do more than drive to the library (like its 1994) and look up information. They had to do empirical research that spanned two weeks. That’s commendable.